Born probably in 1722. Followed his older brother
Lavrentiy as amonk. Since 1745 in the monasteries of
Athon. In 1762 completed his only work: 'The History..,"
which, in contrast to the medieval histories, promoted
historicism and conciseness of the Bulgarian nation.

Paisiy followed directly or indirectly the work of
his contemporaries: the Croat monk Andriya Kachich
Mioshich, the Serbian Yovan Raich, the Chech Frantishek
Palazky. Used as sources the historiographies of the
Roman Cardinal Cesar Baronius and Mavro Orbini from
Ragusa (Dubrovnik).

Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaiya

1

Mind you, readers and listeners, you Bulgarian people,
who love and hold dear your kin and your Bulgarian
fatherland and want to un-derstand and know what already is
known about your Bulgarian stock and about your fathers,
forefathers and tsars, patriarchs and saints, how they lived
and what they did. It is necessary and useful for you to
know what already is known about the deeds of your fathers,
just as all other tribes and peoples know their kin and
their tongue, they have their history and every literate man
knows, relates and is proud of his kin and his tongue.

So I too wrote down for you in order what is already
known about your kin and your tongue. Read it and get to
know it, so that you will not be ridiculed and reproached by
other tribes and other peoples. I have come to love the
Bulgarian people and fatherland very much and it has cost me
much labour to collect from different books and histories
until I accumulated and brought together the history of the
Bulgarian kin in this little book for your benefit and
praise. I wrote it for you, who love your people and the
Bulgarian fatherland and who wish to know about your kin and
your tongue. Copy this little book of history and pay to
those who know how to write to copy it for you and take good
care that it does not disappear!

2

But there are those who do not like to know about their
Bulgarian kin and turn to foreign culture and to foreign
tongue and do not care for their Bulgarian tongue but learn
how to read and speak Greek and feel ashamed to call
themselves Bulgarians. O, you misshapen creature, bereft of
reason! Why are you ashamed to call yourself Bulgarian and
do not read and speak your own language? As though the
Bulgarians have not had a kingdom and a state? For so many
years they reigned and reaped glory and were famous all over
the world and many a time they exacted tributes from
powerful Romans and from wise Greeks. And emperors and kings
gave them their royal daughters for wives in order to live
in peace and love with the Bulgarian tsars. The Bulgarians
were the most famous of all Slav peoples, they were the
first to call themselves tsars, they were the first to have
a patriarch, they were the first to become converted into
the Christian faith and it was they who conquered the
largest territory. Just as powerful and respected by all the
Slav peoples were also those first Slav saints who came to
shine in radiance descending from the Bulgarian people and
speaking the Bulgarian language, as I have written all about
it in this history. For this too the Bulgarians have
tes-timony from many histories because everything about the
Bulgarians is true, as I have said.

3

O, you unreasonable man, why are you ashamed of your
race and why are you dragging after a foreign language?
But, you would say, the Greeks are wiser and more
cultivated, whereas the Bulgarians are simple-minded and
stupid and have no refined words. That is why, you would
say, it would be better if we side with them. But look
here, you, who are bereft of reason, there are many
peoples that are wiser and greater than the Greeks. Does
any Greek forsake his tongue and his people like you,
witless one, forsake them, gaining nothing from the Greek
wisdom and refinement? Do not let yourself, Bulgarian, be
deceived, know your people and language and acquire
knowledge in your own tongue! I would rather have the
Bulgarian simple-mind-edness and gentleness. The
simple-minded Bulgarians welcome ev-eryone to their home
and treat him, they give alms to those who come to beg of
them. Whereas the wise and cultured (Greeks) never do
such things, but take from the simple-minded and rob them
so that they commit more sins than benefit of their
wisdom and culture. Or may be you feel ashamed of your
people and of your language before the learned and the
merchants and the famed ones on this earth, because the
Bulgarians are simple of mind and there are not many
merchants and literate among them or such that are
skilled and famous on this earth today because the
majority of them are ordinary ploughmen, diggers,
shepherds and simple artisans? I shall be brief in
answering this. From Adam to David and to Joachim the
Righteous One, to Joseph the Betrothed (to the Holy
Virgin), whatever righteous and holy prophets and
patriarchs there were, named great both on this earth and
before God, no one had ever been a merchant or a very sly
- and proud man like these slyboots whom you treat with
respect and marvel at and are after their language and
customs. All those pious forefathers were farmers and
shepherds, rich in livestock and the fruits of the earth,
of simple mind and gentle. And Christ Himself descended
to earth and went to live in the home of the
simple-minded and poor Joseph. You see how God loves the
simple-minded and gentle shepherds and ploughmen more and
how it was them that he first got to love and praise on
this earth, yet you feel ashamed because the Bulgarians
are simple-minded and unskilled, because they are
shepherds and ploughmen, and you forsake your people and
your language, praise the foreign language and are after
foreign customs.

4

I saw many Bulgarians behaving like this, keen on the
foreign lan-guage and custom, abusing their own. That is
why I have written here about those who abuse their
fathers and do not love their own people and language;
but for those of you who want to know and to hear about
your people and language I have written for you to know
and remember that our Bulgarian kings, patriarchs and
prelates had their annals and codices. For many years
they reigned and ruled on earth and had royal chronicles
and codices of the prelates, they had knowl-edge of
everything and of the life-stories of many Bulgarian
saints and of religious service. But at that time there
were no Slav printing-shops and the people, owing to
carelessness, did not copy books. Such books were to be
found at very few places. And when the Turks sud-denly
invaded the Bulgarian lands they showed no tolerance and
put to fire churches, monasteries, palaces of tsars and
prelates. At that time the people scared of the Turkish
horrors, ran for their lives and it was in those hard
times that the royal histories and the codicies of the
Bulgarian patriarchs and prelates and the life-stories of
many saints were destroyed. And today we do not possess
the annals, relat-ing extensively about our people and
about the Bulgarian tsars.

I read many and many books and spent much time searching
diligently but could find nothing. In many manuscripts and
printed histories there is hardly anything to be found, only
very brief notes. A certain Mavrubir, a Latin, translated a
short history about the Bulgar-ian tsars from the &reek
but extremely brief-I could just find their names and who
succeeded whom on the throne. That Mavrubir wrote as
follows: "This is what the Greeks say, prompted by their
envy and hatred for the Bulgarians. They did not describe
the valiant conduct and the glorious deeds of the Bulgarian
people and tsars but wrote in brief and just the opposite as
it would best suit them so that they would not feel ashamed
of the fact that the Bulgarians had defeated them many times
and exacted taxes from them." From that Mavrubir and from
many other histories it took me a long time to collect what
was essential which I elaborated a little and compiled this
brief his-tory. In spite of the fact that there are many
books in which only short notes are to be found about the
Bulgarians yet since everyone cannot have these books to
read and keep them in his memory I reasoned it would be
better to compile everything in one book.

5

POSTSCRIPT

I, Paissii, a priest-monk and deputy-abbot of the
monastery of Khilen-dar, collected and wrote these simple
Slavic words, translated from the simple Russian words, for
the sake of the Bulgarians. Love and pity for my Bulgarian
people were gnawing at me, because there is not a single
book of history, narrating the glorious exploits of our
people, saints and tsars from the olden times. Thus and many
a time the Serbians and the Greeks rebuked me that we do not
have our own history. I saw in my books and histories much
written evidence about the Bulgarians. That is why I worked
hard for two years in collecting information little by
little from many history books, and I went even to the land
of the Germans with this purpose in mind. There I found
Mavrubir's history-book about the Serbians and the
Bulgarians, in brief about the tsars, about the saints he
has not written anything. He has been a Latin (Catholic),
and did not respect the Bulgarian and Greek saints.... But
about the Serbian saints he writes badly and hides many
things, and about the Bulgarian saints he did not mention
anything at all. Thus I ignored my headache from which I
suffered a long time, as well as my stomach pains that
tormented me all the time-all this I ignored because of the
great fervent wish I had. And all the buried and forgotten
things in the distant past I was with great efforts able to
collect together-writing down words and sentences. I have
never studied either grammar, or secular science. As a
simple Bulgarian, simply I wrote it too. I did not try to
arrange the words and put the letters properly in their
place according to the grammar, I only tried to collect
together all the information in this little history -book.

And I wrote it in the monastery of Khilendar (in Mount
Athos), whose Abbot Lavrentii is my flesh and blood brother
from the same mother, and older than me: he was then sixty
years old, and I-forty. Then in the Khilendar there were
great disturbances and discords among the brethren. Hence I
could not stand this in Khilendar, and I left the monastery
and went to the monastery of Izograph. Then I found more
information and writings about the Bulgarians. I added them
too to this little history and there I finished it for good
of our Bulgarian people....